February 1, 1979, was the most important day in the life of Mohsen Rafiqdoost. On that day the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran by plane from a fourteen-year exile imposed by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had left two
weeks earlier. Khomeini's plane arrived from Paris. The route from the airport
to downtown Tehran was lined with adoring millions. Rafiqdoost pulled his car
up to the plane. He was to be Khomeini's driver and the chief of Khomeini's
personal-security detail.

I met Rafiqdoost during a visit to Iran not long ago, and we spent more than
two hours talking in his Tehran office. He seemed every bit the bodyguard.
Energy and aggression rippled from his compact, slightly stocky physique as he
sat on the edge of his chair, tapping his foot and banging his thigh with his
fist, and nodding his head whenever he had a point to make. Rafiqdoost has a
short salt-and-pepper beard and thin straight hair that is only now, in his mid-fifties, showing signs of receding. His profile is vaguely feral, in a way that
makes him look menacing without making him ugly. His small, beetle-shell eyes
radiate a playful dangerousness.

During our meeting Rafiqdoost straddled the line between suave and sleazy. He
could almost have passed for a nightclub bouncer. He wore a designer-quality
striped shirt, a well-tailored black sports jacket, and gray slacks. His beard
was neatly clipped. On his feet, though, were rubber beach thongs—a high-quality
brand like the kind sold in L. L. Bean catalogues. Rafiqdoost apologized for the
thongs. "I forgot that a visitor was expected. They are more comfortable to work
in."

He was quite serious about the work. Around his desktop computer was a clutter
of notes and documents, upon which lay a pair of reading glasses with
fashionable frames. Iran, somewhat like Turkey, and unlike most places in the
Third World, is a place where office desks are used for real work rather than
merely for the display of petty bureaucratic power. The desk and the office
managed to be impressive nonetheless, with fashionable olive-gray chairs and a
Sony television set.

Rafiqdoost is definitely a man of parts, and a dynamic one at that—as talented
and dangerous with his computer as he is with his fists. That is why I wanted
to see him. For Rafiqdoost had not only been Khomeini's chief bodyguard. He
also played a key role in forming the Revolutionary Guards that brutally
crushed secular moderates and members of the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq
(People's Holy Warriors), among other supposed enemies of the Islamic
Revolution. Rafiqdoost now controls something called the Bonyad-e Mostazafan
(Foundation of the Oppressed), Iran's largest holding company. The Bonyad is
made up of some 1,200 firms, and was established with money confiscated from
the Shah's family and from prominent industrialists who fled the revolution.
One Iranian, no fan of Rafiqdoost's, calls this foundation—ostensibly an
operation to help the poor—"the greatest cartel in history." Rafiqdoost is, in
all probability, worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

When I entered his office, he offered me his hand as if from a podium. He had
little modesty. He knew his importance.

How Rafiqdoost happened to be behind the wheel of that Chevy Blazer the day
Khomeini returned to Iran, how he took control of a substantial part of the
Shah's fortune, and how he converted that fortune into an even bigger financial
empire—these are things for which a Marxist would have a ready answer: they
are the result of Rafiqdoost's socio-economic class. In this case the Marxist
would be right. Rafiqdoost is a bazaari, a member of the class of people
who helped make the Iranian Revolution.

Ironically, the Marxist probably never
would have identified the bazaaris as a social class in the first place.
This is because Marxists see classes only as they relate to the means of
production, not as they actually function. As Nikki R. Keddi has pointed out, in
Roots of Revolution, bazaaris don't fall into any of the usual
categories.The worker in a hole-in-the-wall shop in the bazaar is certainly in a
position different from that of a big moneylender in the bazaar. But both the
laborer and the moneylender are bazaaris. They are both involved in petty
trade of a traditional, or nearly traditional, kind, centered on the bazaar and
its Islamic culture. At least, that has been the usual definition of bazaari.

Bazaar is a Persian word that means "market." Westerners often use it
interchangeably with the Arabic word souk for markets throughout Muslim
North Africa and the Near East. The bazaar is often the first place tourists
head for, in order to lose themselves in serpentine alleys lined with shops,
sometimes built under picturesque archways—as in Tunis or Jerusalem—conjuring
up the cliché of the "fabulous East." Although Western goods are sold in
the bazaar, and bazaaris sell souvenirs to Western tourists and smile
before their cameras, real Westernization—supermarkets, department stores,
machine-made goods, large banks—threatens the bazaari's livelihood. The smile
before the camera, therefore, is often a deceptive one.

But bazaaris are not simply the men behind the stalls in the picturesque
Oriental market. According to a relatively new definition that has taken hold
among academics and journalists in the past few decades, bazaaris as a
social class can exist only in places where the society is in the midst of an
awkward modernization; where the bazaar is in some stage of transition between
the world of A Thousand and One Nights and that of the suburban shopping
mall; where the welder's sparks singe the classic image of turbaned men
inhaling tobacco smoke from hubble-bubbles.

Bazaaris, therefore, though age-old in the historical sense, are
relatively new in the political sense. The Muslim Brotherhood—the Ikhwan—in
Egypt is heavily backed by bazaari types. Although that organization, so
dangerous to pro-Western regimes in the Near East, consists largely of narrowly
educated men of peasant background, it is the better-educated sons of traditional
bazaaris, like Rafiqdoost, being a slight step up on the social ladder, who
often lead the narrowly educated men in trying to topple an established order.

In other words, bazaaris constitute a sort of newly established Islamic
petty bourgeoisie. They must compete with more-experienced Christian and Jewish
merchants, both in and outside the bazaar. This competition quickens the
bazaaris' resentments, which are often similar to those that were in
evidence among the petty bourgeoisie in Europe during the age of
industrialization.

The Near East at the end of the twentieth century is, of course, a region in
great social turmoil and economic transition, as Europe was throughout the
nineteenth century and in the twentieth until the Second World War. Bazaari
typesare increasingly significant politically, as the case of the
Muslim Brotherhood suggests. "Rafiqdoost," an Iranian friend explained, "is an
absolute bazaari through and through": a boy of the streets who learned
math with a scratch pad at his father's fruit stand. In the Muslim Near East,
especially in Iran, only a bazaari could assume the roles of both
bodyguard and financier.